Computers have become highly integrated in the workforce, in the home, in mobile devices, and many other places. Computers can process massive amounts of information quickly and efficiently. Software applications designed to run on computer systems allow users to perform a wide variety of functions including business applications, schoolwork, entertainment and more. Software applications are often designed to perform specific tasks, such as word processor applications for drafting documents, or email programs for sending, receiving and organizing email.
In some cases, software applications may be designed to parse the text of documents, emails or other strings of characters. In such cases, regular expressions may be used to identify words, phrases or certain characters within the text. For instance, spam filters may use regular expressions to scan for certain words or phrases in email messages that are commonly associated with unwanted spam messages. In other cases, regular expressions may scan for strings of numbers or other characters. These regular expressions, however, may be very large and complicated. Processing these complicated regular expressions may consume considerable amounts of processing resources.